ODDS N ENDS

• There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that in order to be recruited and awarded an athletic scholarship to a big time D1 university you have to be the star of your team by the time you are a freshman in high school and you have to have 500 letters from every school in the country by the time you are a sophomore. While that is sometimes true, success and notoriety often come slower to many. I marvel at the fact that Tom Brady was a backup quarterback on his freshman HS football team that went 0-8. When he arrived at Michigan he was the 7th string quarterback. He almost quit his senior year of college because he didn’t want to compete for time with Drew Henson. The patriots scouting directors had to beg the organization to draft Brady and they had to beg to have him back after his first year. Believe in your ability, work hard, and put yourself in a position to succeed. There is some luck involved in the success of some athletes in high school, college, and the professional ranks.

• If you didn’t notice super bowl MVP Deion Branch in last years super bowl, you probably did this year as he tied a super bowl record with 11 catches. In high school Branch was offered a scholarship to play for Florida, and after the offer he basically stopped going to high school by his own admission. His grades tanked and Florida pulled their scholarship offer (I guess some schools do have a backbone!). Branch had to attend Jones County Junior College for a year before ultimately transferring to Louisville and being drafted by the patriots. Branch is one of like 20 Patriots players that don’t fit the prototypical physical attributes that top D1 programs and pro teams look for in a football player. Branch is probably 5’9” wearing cleats, but has blazing quickness and I haven’t seen him drop a ball in 3 years. You don’t have to be the biggest, fastest, or strongest guy in the world to succeed and succeed at a high level, and while there are many schools who won’t recruit you because of your size or some other attribute, there are others that will.

• Notre Dame’s top quarterback recruit shunned the school ultimately choosing USC on signing day. His reason – “Coach Weiss didn’t visit my house.” Perhaps coach Weiss was busy trying to work 2 jobs, one being the offensive coordinator for the best football team in the NFL getting ready for the Super Bowl. If Notre Dame offers you a scholarship to play quarterback, it’s a good bet that they are sincerely interested in your abilities regardless of whether or not they sit in your living room and tell you how much they want you. Here are the excuses he didn’t use but certainly could have. Notre Dame has no tradition, Notre Dame games are only on “National TV”, a Notre Dame degree is worth nothing in the real world, Charlie Weiss knows very little about football, I was rejected as an extra in Rudy and now I am getting my revenge, the Urban location of USC makes me feel safe and secure and downtown LA bustles at night, coach Carroll told me I have a great chance to start over Matt Leinart as a freshman, USC’s 62% student-athlete graduation rate is certainly more appealing than Notre Dames 87%, coach Carroll told me that his offensive coordinator isn’t going anywhere. If I can learn the same discipline and compassion for human life as OJ learned at USC, then I will be ok! – Had he said, it’s too cold there, there is nothing to do, the team stinks, the teams rebuilding, USC gives me a better shot to get drafted, the team never passes, the girls are prettier in California, I can surf on off days, I would have understood his reasoning. This isn’t quite as bad as one recruit who told a school he wasn’t coming because another school he looked at had a soft serve ice cream machine in the cafeteria! You laugh but that’s a true story. The coach on the losing end of that demanded the school install an ice cream machine soon after, vowing to never lose another recruit over frozen cream and sugar.

• A high school in Massachusetts is proposing random drug tests for student-athletes and students that participate in extra-curricular activities. Apparently the students who simply go home after school or work a job instead of playing soccer, participating in the math club, or playing tuba in the band are free to keep doing as many drugs as they wish. Can’t wait till this hits the courts. The fear now is that kids just won’t sign up for extra-curricular activities for fear of getting in trouble. Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t I guess.

• Earlier this month Ryan Perrilloux (a quarterback) signed an NLI with the LSU Tigers backing out of a verbal agreement with Texas. Perrilloux threw for 3,500 yards and 30 touchdowns his senior year and ran for 1,450 yards and another 37 touchdowns (that’s 67 touchdown’s in one season by the way!) and racked up over 12,000 yards of offense in his high school career. Am I reading those numbers correctly? Do you want to reconsider your scholarship potential after reading that?

• Just a year removed from the Colorado football scandals, the school announced they will be relaxing their recruiting visits and giving recruits more freedom to interact with current players on their own. This is the same school where drug, alcohol, and sex were the normal entertainment for visiting recruits. Seems like a good decision to me…

• What do you get when you take an AAU soccer team, an indoor game at 11PM at night, with no head coach, an assistant coach who is 17 years old, and one 18-year-old referee? Answer, a brawl on the field followed by several arrests, court appearances for assault and battery charges, and your team being banned from the facility for life!

• I was watching (Gulp!) Dr. Phil last month and they had an interesting panel on. It was about youth athletes who had already determined that they were pre-destined to be professional athletes at the age of 14 and had basically stopped doing homework or well in school. The panel consisted of Coach Carter, (yes the one from the movie) and Samuel L Jackson. One player was a 14-year-old basketball player who I don’t think was even in high school. Samuel L Jackson wasted no time by asking “Are you even the best player on your team?” The player responded by saying “No”, and Jackson basically said that should tell you something right there! Coach Carter then said something that even amazed myself. He said, “Do you know that in this country right now there are about 5,000 current professional athletes and Microsoft alone has more than 10,000 millionaires working for their company right now!” I paused after than comment and said, wow, he is actually right and not only that but there are about 650 hockey players with no job at all right now! The show concluded by featuring a few other kids and basically said, yes it’s ok to love your sport and dream big, but if you look at the facts and the numbers, you basically have a better chance of being a professional in any other profession and to dismiss your education will not only cost you a chance to even play in college, but cost you throughout your life. Like we say, work hard, dream big, but have a backup plan.

• The athletic department at the University of Indiana has lost 5 million dollars in the last three years.

• I was reading a message board about a parent whose son was rejected from University of Florida with a 3.8 GPA and an 1140 on his SAT. He was trying to play baseball there, but wasn't actively recruited by the coach. I still think he should have been accepted to the school though with those numbers?

• Ray at the Athletes Advisor emailed a club lacrosse team director in Massachusetts recently asking if he could do an article on the program and learn more about it, club lacrosse in general, and the role they play in college recruiting as lacrosse is a fast growing sport in the North East. There was no hidden agenda other than to learn more about the program and pass that information along to future lacrosse players. This is the response he got back – “Thank you for contacting me, your site is impressive! We have been fortunate enough to work with a recruiting company and financial aid advisor for our players, so for now we are very happy with both organizations however we will keep your information if that changes.” – Now, normally organizations are weary of talking to anyone that is trying to promote expensive services to their kids. In this case, this club director is trying to not only keep a free resource away from their kids by shielding the paid services they are using, but they are turning down the opportunity to promote their sport and their program which makes even less sense to me. While the likely scenario is that they didn’t understand what Athletes Advisor does and may have misinterpreted the email, I am starting to wonder if the club director is getting a kickback from the recruiting and financial services that are being provided to the parents?? Athletes Advisor like Varsityedge.com is neither a recruiting service nor a financial aid service, so the fact that this club director said “you have an impressive site” leads me to believe that they actually didn’t look at it at all. I told Ray to find out who their competitor was and do a story on them instead. As a club coach, I hope part of your job is to make sure your players have as many resources available to them. The fact that this coach turned down this opportunity leads me to believe that they are not fully committed to helping their kids get to the next level or really interested in their general athletic development. If you don’t think our information is beneficial, that’s perfectly fine, but at least put forth some effort to find out who we are and what we do.

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ARTICLES OF INTEREST
Below are three articles of interest. I cannot guarantee how long the links will be valid.

• Article about Dartmouth University and the natural attrition of college athletes. GO
• Article about basketball recruiting, mail, contacts, etc...GO
• Article about how competitive schools have become trying to draw in new students. GO

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COLLEGE MAJORS
Many students fret over what their major is going to be and throughout the application process they struggle with the fact that they think they have to have the next 20 years of their life planned out. No one starts a career at age 17 and even If you do, you are never bound to one thing. The biggest intention of college is not to learn a specific skill per say, but to learn how to do work, work with others, work by yourself and grow as an individual. College itself is a learning experience, and even if you got straight F’s for four years, you would certainly learn something. In January the Boston Globe ran an article on four Red Sox employees aged 28 to 33 who have various roles from Assistant to the General Manager, to Director of Baseball Operations. The four young men majored in the following…History, Psychology, American Studies, and Russian Studies/Political Science. The moral of the story is that, it’s not always who you know or what you know, it’s how you apply the skills and traits you have as an individual to a certain job or task. While these are four hard working individuals, much of the actual content and subject matter they learned in their major in college has little actual influence over the success of their job. Employers are ultimately looking for hard working successful individuals, who can be given a task and can work to complete it. Being a business major doesn’t mean you can’t teach English one day and being an English major doesn’t mean you can’t work in business one day.

SCHOLARSHIP OFFERS
In January Ray at the Athletesadvisor.com received the following email - I recently read your article in next step magazine regarding athletic scholarships. My daughter is a HS senior & has been offered an athletic scholarship for year 3 & possibly year 4(the coach says no $ available years 1&2) at a D-2 school. Right now the coach says they cannot guarantee a full scholarship for year 3 but can at least put a set amount aside. Would we still sign a NLI in this case? If not, do we get something in writing? Any advice?
What is happening here is common in college recruiting. A coach has no money but is interested in a particular recruit and is trying to entice them with an offer down the road. In this case, they would not sign an NLI because you only sign an NLI when you are receiving “athletic” scholarship money from a D1 or D2 NCAA school. While it’s extremely possible that the coach is telling the truth about setting aside a dollar figure for year 3, there is nothing legally that they can sign or give you to guarantee this. There is also no guarantee that the coach will even be around in 3 years or that they will still want to give you money at that time. They may conclude that your skills do not warrant the money in year 3 or they may find it more enticing to give money to a new freshman recruit in your year 3. Would you rather have a talented player for 4 more years or 2 years? The language the coach uses also scares me a little “We can’t guarantee a full scholarship” – Well, why not? Obviously the coach knows how much free money they will have in two years. They cannot guarantee it is a nice way of saying, we will have some free money in year 3 and depending on your skills at that point, we may give you some, but we certainly cannot guarantee a full scholarship because most-likely we will need to use that money for other recruits, otherwise we cannot guarantee that we will have any other recruits that want to come to our program.

DOING YOUR HOMEWORK
If you have purchased The Making of a Student-Athlete, by now you have noticed that we strongly encourage parents and students to do as much research as they possibly can on each individual school and to approach each school, program, and coach in a personal and individual basis. If this paragraph from a Division 2 baseball coach doesn’t sum this up, we are not sure what does….

"I sort through so many lists of prospects that I have to find quick ways to start eliminating kids before I can really get down to recruiting. So I make it easy. Any letters that begin with Dear Sir or just Dear Coach, they go in the trash can without a glance. If they spell my name wrong it goes in the trash. If they put the name of the old coach, it goes in the trash. If they get past my initial screening process, and the letter starts out something like, "I have always admired your program and the success you have had..." it goes in the trash. I have only been here one year and the program has been awful for the last five years. Show me you took time to learn about us, and address me in a way that shows you understand a little about the school, the team, and me. These are the kids who are interested."

Remember, most college coaches want to recruit kids that are truly interested in their program. This is why we discourage mass mailings, form letters, and get recruited quick Internet sites and services that don’t allow you to create a personal relationship with a coach. While some coaches might look at that stuff, most will not.

FINANCIAL AID
I encountered an interesting situation in January. A parent called me and asked me for some advice on scholarship blending/equivalency and financial aid. Without getting carried away, scholarship blending is when a coach/school combines athletic scholarship money with institutional financial aid. Institutional aid is aid that comes directly from the school at their own discretion. Equivalency is the rule that restricts athletic programs from giving an unlimited amount of aid out to student-athletes, after their scholarship dollars have been allotted. Equivalency has little or no relevance at the D1 level for football or basketball as those programs are fully funded, but is extremely important for other sports. Here is an example. A D1 baseball team is allowed to award 11.78 scholarships for the entire team. If they are at that mark, the school cannot award any institutional aid to any additional players that are receiving athletic scholarship money unless they meet certain academic criteria for SAT/ACT score, class rank, or GPA. Now if another D1 baseball team only offers 5 scholarships for the entire team, the school can award institutional money to additional players up to the monetary equivalent of 11.78 scholarships. Again, this only applies to aid coming directly from a school and does not include Federal money. Depending on your financial situation, what schools you are looking at, and your scholarship potential, this can make your recruiting process more challenging. If you are expecting aid from a school, but the team is max’d out on scholarships, then aid will be hard to come by if you are receiving any scholarship money. If the school is willing to give you institutional money to help with your tuition expenses, scholarship money may be hard to come by. Since the equivalency money only counts for student-athletes receiving any athletic scholarship money, some coaches may ask you to walk-on, so your institutional money doesn’t count towards the team. This is all a moot point if you meet one of the 4 academic criteria. From what we have heard, equivalency isn't an issue because no financial aid department with a conscience is going to give institutional money to an athlete simply because they are an athlete, and you either have the grades that warrant additional money which will make the money not countable towards the team or you don't have the grades and won't get any additional institutional money!

Another challenging aspect is finding out what your federal financial need will be in time to actually apply it to your recruiting process. Since FAFSA forms are filled out starting in January of your senior year, many players will have concluded their recruiting process and received and accepted offers from college coaches. If you don’t know what you will have to pay for college, telling a certain coach yes or no is more difficult. You may say Yes, and then 6 months later fill out the FAFSA form and realize you need an additional $10,000 a year to pay for school. This isn’t an issue if you are being offered full scholarships, but for most student-athletes, scholarship offers may be only a few thousand dollars a year and you will have to come up with a significant chunk of change. Most coaches understand this and many will do some preliminary financial aid calculations to get a sense of where you fall and what you will ultimately need. If you don’t know what you will be expected to pay, its difficult to say yes to a coach, so do you due diligence ahead of time and try to get some financial aid calculations in place. There are resources online to get a general sense of what your EFC will be well before you have to fill out the FAFSA forms.

NCAA NEWS
There was a proposal in Division 2 football to limit team scholarships to 24 (it’s currently 36). There was also a proposal to prevent D1 football players from transferring to D2 institutions and being eligible immediately. This proposal is to ensure D2 teams are not renting D1 players for one year, but critics are saying there is nothing in that rule to protect academic achievers who want to transfer out of D1 institutions for reasons other than simply football. Both proposals failed to get the required votes to be passed!

The Division III Presidents Council endorsed plans to implement a financial aid electronic reporting process during its January 8 meeting at the NCAA Convention in Dallas. The reporting process, which was approved at the 2004 Convention as part of the Future of Division III reform package, requires that schools submit data to the NCAA for use in analyzing whether student-athletes and non-athletes are receiving comparable financial aid, as required by legislation. Among the steps approved by the Council is implementation of a model proposed by the Division III Financial Aid and Awards Committee that establishes a maximum permissible “variance” between aid for student-athletes and nonathletes. Instances where aid awarded by an institution to student-athletes exceeds aid for the broader student body by four percent or more will be subject to a financial aid committee review, which may include a subsequent request for the institution to justify that variance

The NCAA is still tinkering with a uniform college baseball start date. Their tentative proposal calls for a start practice date of February 1st and competition date of March 1st. This is to give northern teams a better chance at competing. My feeling is that if you give southern teams more days to practice as opposed to actually playing games during the month of February, they will only become more talented, because all the players who normally don’t play and sit and watch games will get to practice and work on their game 6 days a week. You cannot go outside at all in February up north, so February 1st as a start date, means very little!

NCAA ACADEMIC PROGRESS RATE
The NCAA is rolling out their new academic measurement tool called the Academic Progress Rate. It’s basically a system designed to push college athletic teams to pay more attention to academics and to punish those that don’t. The APR applies to all sports and is based on a 5-year period and teams are expected to achieve at least a 50% graduation rate and success will ultimately be determined by players that return to your team each year and are eligible. Teams that fail to meet the set APR will begin to loose scholarships that cannot be replaced for one year. There is also a cap on the number of scholarships a given team can loose and the cap is no more than 10% of what the team offers, so a D1 football team with 85 scholarships, couldn’t lose more than 9 scholarships. If a team has several years of a sub-par APR, they could lose championship eligibility, a much stiffer penalty than a loss of one or two scholarships.

 
 
 
 
 

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